How did snakes get to look the way they do?
Snakes are the most successful of all living reptiles. They are amazingly adapted for their life close to the surface of the ground. And while many people assume that snakes have always looked the way they do, scientists believe that this most recently evolved of all the reptile groups achieved their current form as slender, tubular animals devoid of legs, quite late in geological history, some 65 million years ago. They are believed to have evolved from a Mesozoic monitor-lizard-type ancestor. According to Alan Tennant, who wrote The Snakes of Texas, the scenario goes something like this. In order to escape increasingly heavy predation from the many agile, voracious, warm-blooded little dinosaurs which combed the late Cretaceous plains in search of easy, slow-moving prey, ancestral snakes took to the underground. Over time, in the safety of subterranean burrows, their lifestyle changed radically as they gradually abandoned their limbs, free breathing, good eyesight and hearing – a big
